I can't believe people will still put in all of this work instead of just... using their system's native GUI. Mind-boggling.
I've done both, I prefer embedded web views:
- All the work is done in my high performance backend, where I joyfully optimise my hot loops to the assembly level. The web view is a thin layer on top.
- HTML and CSS is a joy to work with in comparison to many UI toolkits. LLMs are better at supporting a web stack.
- The UI zooms/scales, and is accessible with screen readers (looking at you, imgui).
- Cross platform with low effort.
IMO you have to be extremely careful not to pull in a whole frontend stack. Stay as vanilla as possible, maybe alpine.js or tailwind, and I've got hot reload set up so the developer productivity loop is tight when editing the view.
A lot of claims were also made about how Tauri is magically more performant than Electron apps and feels like a native app, but not only is this not true, on some platforms like Linux, Tauri apps are actually slower than Electron because the system webview it uses (generally WebKitGTK) is often slower and less optimised than the Chromium build that Electron ships with[2].
There's a bunch more claims due to it being "Rust" and all the memes that comes with that territory, but all that is basically irrelevant since your "app" is basically shitty javascript in the end. It's like putting lipstick and dressing up a pig, doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig.
[1] https://github.com/orgs/tauri-apps/discussions/3162
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/tauri/comments/1kg5zb8/will_tauri_f...